Amityville Christmas Vacation (2022) Review
There’s an Amityville film connected to everything else so I actually wasn’t that surprised when I noticed Tubi had added Amityville Christmas Vacation to its lineup. While I wasn’t expecting much, I did notice it was directed and co-written with Bill Murphy, by Steve Rudzinski. Rudzinski made a film called CarousHELL, and while I don’t remember it being good, it at least had an imaginative plot and enough going on that I wasn’t bored.
Unfortunately, as I soon found out, Rudzinski and Murphy have also done a series of films about Wally, a bumbling cop named who makes Inspector Clouseau look like Sherlock Holmes, and his cat. A Meowy St. Patrick’s Day, A Meowy Christmas Vacation, you get the idea. And Amityville Christmas Vacation was the latest film in that franchise.
The film opens with a voiceover explaining that an unnamed “they” need a sacrifice to keep evil forces away and since all cops are bastards, Wally (Steve Rudzinski) is the perfect choice, if they can get him to fall for their scam.
Sure enough, Wally comes downstairs and tells the cat he’s won a contest he never entered and received his notification in a blank envelope, so of course, it must be legit. And if he doesn’t claim it, it might go to Rick (Ben Dietels, The Boonies, Slaughter Drive). The look the cat gives him pretty much said what I was thinking. Unfortunately, after a painfully bad scene of him packing a suitcase, he leaves for vacation without his furry co-star.
I’m not sure who Rudzinski and Murphy intended Amityville Christmas Vacation for, but I can’t imagine anyone finding him singing “O Christmas Tree”, not the song just that one line, over and over to be funny. And it doesn’t get any better once he reaches his destination, directly across the street from a cartoonish representation of the infamous Amityville house.
If you think the sight of a grown man wearing oversized children’s pajamas, stuffing cereal in his face, and jumping on the bed is hysterically funny then you might find this amusing. Although I’m willing to bet watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure or even Pee Wee Plays With His Pee Pee for the millionth time would be more entertaining than anything in Amityville Christmas Vacation.
Amityville Christmas Vacation tries to be so stupid that it’s funny in the same way the Ernest films or Dumb and Dumber were. Unfortunately, it’s just stupid, incredibly, and unfunnily stupid. Wally eventually falls for Jessica (Aleen Isley, Everyone Must Die!, A Meowy Dark Timeline) the ghost that was supposed to kill him without noticing she’s a ghost, even after she tells him and floats to the top of the Christmas tree. And for some reason, she falls for him which causes problems with her boss back at the hit ghost agency and the Earthly woman who hired her.
By the time a ghost hunter turns up and somehow catches Jessica in a metal animal trap I was ready to go shovel snow to put off watching the rest of this disaster, the -47 temperature would be less painful to endure. But I’d gotten this far, and since it only runs forty-seven minutes I persisted. Unfortunately, it never gets any better, death from hypothermia would have been more merciful.
This could have been a funny parody of Amityville films as well as ghost films. Or even a romantic comedy, a brain-damaged version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. But the filmmakers lacked the talent to pull either of them off and seem to have just tossed whatever came to mind on a piece of paper and called it a script. This was as hard to sit through as Amityville Thanksgiving despite being half an hour shorter.
Amityville Christmas Vacation is available free to watch on Tubi if you doubt me. If you’re really feeling masochistic you can order a physical copy from the filmmakers’ website. FilmTagger can suggest something similar and hopefully better.